Stockholm, Sweden: Palaces, Viking Dinner, Meatballs, Lingonberries, the Vasa Museum, & More

We truly didn’t know a lot about Sweden when we booked this trip, other than it’s geographic location and that it’s in a section of Europe known as Scandinavia, which is where the Vikings originated.  However, when we started our travel search on Skyscanner, we input ‘Naples, Italy’ for the departure location, the dates we wanted to travel, and ‘everywhere’ as the destination, Stockholm came up as one of the most inexpensive destinations at the time. Not knowing a lot about this particular country really filled me with a lot of excitement when planning the trip.   This is what traveling is all about....discovering the unknown and being open to embrace it.  This exact feeling is what constantly fuels our desire to travel!  May the adventure begin!

​Day 1
Sweden is known for Swedish meatballs, lingonberries, Fika pastry, and beer.  I’m sure there’s more to it, but this is the broad scope of what we were looking forward to on the menu.  We arrived in the afternoon and after getting our rental car and checking into our hotel, we ate at a Swedish meatball restaurant that I found great reviews for online called ‘Meatballs for the People.’  They had a rather small menu, but we were only there for the meatballs anyway!  They were flippin delicious!!  The meatballs are served smothered in gravy, with mashed potatoes on the side.  This particular restaurant was chic and fun and had bottles of fresh Lingonberry juice for purchase for the table.  We drank two of those bottles! Lingonberry juice tastes much like Cranberry juice, being in the same family as cranberries, but wasn’t as tart as cranberry juice.  My middle son, Gabriel, expressed to me.....not less than 10 times on this trip, that Swedish meatballs are his absolute favorite food in the world. This boy moaned every time he ate and asked for meatballs at EVERY meal. At 9 years old, he ate an adult portion for every meal.....he’s got such a foodie heart and I love it!!  

Meatballs for the People

Swedish meatballs, mashed potatoes, lingonberries

​After lunch, we walked and drove around the city. It’s very clean and beautiful with beautiful waterways and bridges throughout. We went to a museum called the Vasa Museum that we had heard great things about. Essentially, this ship on display at the Vasa museum was built in 1628 and sunk on its maiden voyage after sailing about 1300 meters.  After 333 years on the bottom of the ocean, it was brought back up, restored, and put on display in this museum. The museum is very interactive and interesting, with great technology, and we greatly enjoyed it.  Tickets cost 150 SEK (Swedish Krona), which was equivalent to about $16 per adult. Kids 18 and under are free.

A model of the ship at the Vasa Museum

The ship at the Vasa Museum

​Scandinavia is historically known as being the home of the Vikings. For dinner that evening, we had a reservation for a Viking dinner experience at a restaurant called Aifur Krog and Bar.  As we entered, they sounded a horn and gave us a loud, boisterous introduction to the whole restaurant. They asked us where we were from and upon hearing that we’re American, introduced us to the restaurant as being from California. It was pretty funny. We drank beer from ceramic chalices, ate dinner with a 2 pronged fork, and enjoyed great food and music.  We really missed the extra fork prongs!! It was really difficult to get meat to stay on the fork.  We ordered a couple of meat platters and shared.  I didn’t expect for the food to be as good as it was!  We all had a very fun experience.

Skol!!! At Aifur Krog and Bar

The meat platter

The silverware with the weird fork

**Insider information: Stockholm is incredibly expensive, especially at restaurants.  The sticker shock at restaurants regularly made our eyes bug out of our heads! =) Plan accordingly. 
 
Day 2
The next day, we drove to Drottningholm Palace and the Chinese Pavillion. The palace is a residence of the Swedish Royal family and was built in the 1600s.  I had purchased tickets in advance, online, on the website linked above. Tickets are about $14/adult and about $7 for kids (after converting Swedish Krona to U.S. dollars). The palace itself was enormous and grand and everything a palace should be!  Grandious with incredible detail, to include an adorable royal crib and one heck of a royal bedroom!  We also enjoyed walking the grounds and went onward to the second part of our self-guided tour, which was another buildings on the grounds called the Chinese Pavilion.  The Chinese Pavilion was a gift from one of the king’s to the queen, was sparsely furnished, and rather small.  We didn’t find it worth the time to tour and were quite underwhelmed, but we were blown away that someone actually received a gift like this particular building.  

*Insider tip:  The Chinese Pavillion on the Drottningholm Palace grounds really isn't worth the extra money to tour.

Drottningholm Palace

The royal bedchamber

The royal bassinet

The Chinese Pavilion

Day 3
The next day, we watched the changing of the Royal Guard at the Royal Palace of Stockholm. Let me tell you, this was a unique experience that the guard takes very seriously.  It involves a marching band, men on horseback, and a Swedish traditional guard change.  These tourists jumped in front of the guard when they were marching, in order to capture a picture, the guard yelled and literally pushed the tourists out of the way with a stiff arm. We couldn’t believe it!!!  

​After this, we made our way to an amusement park called Grona lund. There’s something really cool about visiting amusement parks in different countries. Their Characters are different, the layout of the parks are different, and it’s a really fun experience. This particular park had tons of great rides, a beer garden, and was right on the water affording gorgeous views. The carnival games awarded ridiculously enormous chocolate bars and candies as the prizes. Our kids begged to play those games!! It was not an enormous park, which is fine with me, and gave the boys a few hours of being a kid, discovering Stockholm the most fun way possible.

A cool looking roller coaster at Grona Lund

A cool astronaut character

Carnival games

A beer garden in the middle of the amusement park

Living in Italy is a blessing, but one thing that we miss a lot is ethnic food. There are few ethnic restaurants, and the few that there are, are not known to be very good.  So, when we travel, we like to get our fill of Indian, Thai, Japanese, & Chinese food. We ate at this super fun restaurant in a section of Stockholm called Sodermalm, called Koh Phangan. The food was excellent and all of the booths were tuktuks.  Not only did we get our fill of ethnic food, but also we felt fabulous in the atmosphere! 
 

The cute little tuktuk tables at Koh Phangan

Fabulous food

​Day 4
On our last day, we meandered around the countryside, stopped at a random palace to walk around, dipped our feet in the Baltic Sea, and went shopping at the town near to the airport.  My favorite days while traveling are often the days with nothing planned. 
 

My first touch of the Baltic Sea

The random palace that we found

We had a wonderful time in Stockholm and highly recommend it to others looking to travel to somewhere different. We want to go back to Scandinavia to Norway on another trip. If you get a chance to look up fjords of Norway, you’ll see why we want to go back!! One thing we definitely learned is that we are a SHORT family!!! My husband is the tallest at 5’6”, so it was fun to joke with each other about being the smallest in the whole of the country.  I am going to include a few random extra photos below.

Up next: The Amalfi Coast of Italia. Positano, Amalfi, Atrani, & Ravello

Roman's first touch of the Baltic Sea

A meal with wild boar